Simon Phipps of Sun has responded to the recent criticism of Sun's openness, pointing out that even releasing information that they may already have costs a lot of money. "Jonathan asked me to look into this, to ensure we're pursuing an open path across all of Sun, not simply the software group. We take all input seriously, and we can't solve all problems for all parties, but we're committed to doing our best to faithfully engage with all the communities we serve, in the same spirit as the existing Open Source Ombudsman Scheme. With the support of my team and others in the community I'll try to build a new scheme that is fair and transparent."

No, but I am a customer, and openness is important. An axis that is important to me, as a customer, is the openness of their drivers and kernel. If they want to pick the "best" chip that precludes them from opening their drivers and parts of their kernel, I might not be so interested in Sun as a vendor. After all, I have plenty of other closed-source Unix options. I also have several open-source Linux options.

Assuming there are other customers concerns like mine, and we have no prospect of getting a soup to nuts open stack sometime in the future (with the understanding that Sun is still in transition), is the "best" chip one that makes it harder for customers to buy your systems? I'm sure an engineer tucked away in a cubical, with no regard for how to market the product might pick chipset A - that is a binary only, closed source driver that prevents the release of portions of the kernel source. However, is that the "best" chipset for the product? If chipset B delivers 95% of the performance at 103% of the power consumption and is willing to release their drivers as open source, isn't that a better chipset in some sense?